AMD preps Hawk Point APU without NPU: Ryzen 7 8745HS is the Ryzen 7 8845HS without XDNA NPU

AMD is reportedly working on a new member of its Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" APU family, with the rumored Ryzen 7 8745HS, which will drop the XDNA-based NPU for AI workloads.

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The purported Ryzen 7 8745HS APU will be virtually identical to the Ryzen 7 8845HS APU, but without the NPU, according to insider and leaker "Golden Pig Upgrade" with a post on Chinese social media. The post teased that the "Ryzen 7 8745HS = Ryzen 7 8845HS-NPU is coming soon, the naming is really interesting".

We should expect the new AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS "Hawk Point" APU to feature 16 cores and 32 threads of CPU power based on the Zen 4 architecture, 16MB of L3 cache, and 8MB of L2 cache. CPU clock speeds should see up to 5.1GHz boost and 3.8GHz base, with the same integrated Radeon 780M GPU with 12 compute units based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture that'll clock at up to 2700MHz.

Onto the NPU side of things, the current Ryzen 7 8845HS "Hawk Point" APU features an integrated XDNA-based NPU with 16 TOPS that offers up to 38 platform TOPS, but the new Ryzen 7 8745HS won't have the NPU so it'll top out at 25 TOPS (pun intended). This means that the new Ryzen 7 8745HS will have less AI power than Intel's Core Ultra 100 series "Meteor Lake" processors which pack 34 TOPS of AI performance.

Not everyone needs NPUs and AI right now, so it's interesting to see AMD drop the ever-important NPU from this new Hawk Point APU. In the future, I think we'll see NPUs being dropped from CPUs more and more as people don't accept them -- even though the chipmakers are forcing them down our throats -- just like the "KF" series Intel CPUs that don't have integrated GPUs, while the "K" series do. Interesting times ahead.